Thursday, February 12, 2015

Staunton, February 12 – Women coming
to the Russian Federation from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are at
much greater risk of contracting HIV/AIDS than are Russians because of the impact
of different norms of sexual behavior there and because of their inability or
failure to get medical attention, according to a new Russian study.

These results are likely to
stimulate both more anti-immigrant attitudes among Russians who already often
view migrants as sources of disease and crime and more concern among the
leaders of Central Asian countries about the consequences for their own societies
of having a large fraction of their populations spend time in the Russian
Federation.

In the current issue of “Demograficheskoye
obozreniye, Viktor Agadzhanyan of the University of Arizona and Natalya Zotova
of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology present the findings of
their survey of 564 Central Asian women in Moscow, Novosibirsk and
Yekaterinburg (opec.ru/1793562.html).

They note that other
investigations have shown that female migrants in many parts of the world are
more inclined to risky sexual behavior and thus face the risk of HIV/AIDS
infection than are male migrants, a pattern that their studied showed held true
for women migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in the Russian
Federation.

Even when they
remain as they often do within their own communities in Russian cities, they are
affected by the very different sexual mores found there, changing partners or
having multiple partners far more often than would ever have been the case at
home and not taking the precautions needed to minimize the risk of infection or
seeking medical attention.

More than
two-thirds of the women in their sample, Agadzhanyan and Zotova say, are
married, either officially or in unregistered ones. Almost a third has higher or
incomplete higher education. And many of them have become citizens of the Russian
Federation, with the share of those acquiring that status highest among the Kyrgyz.

The average
number of sexual partners among the Kyrgyz is higher than among the Uzbeks and
Tajiks, 1.4 as compared to 1.2 and 1.0 respectively. Compared to the other two,
the Kyrgyz women are more sexually liberated and are more inclined than are the
Uzbeks or Tajiks in refusing to have sex, with 60 percent of them saying they
have done so.

At the same time,
the study found, Uzbek women are more convinced that their partners are not
having sex with others – 70 percent said that, a figure higher than among
Russians, Kyrgyz and Tajiks. But all three Central Asian groups are far less
likely than Russians to insist on the use of condoms.

“Almost half of
all the women questioned – 47 percent – are concerned about the risk of HIV
infection,” Tajiks somewhat less – 32 percent – and Kyrgyz and Uzbeks somewhat
more 53 and 55 percent respectively. The figure among ethnic Russians, the two
researchers said, is 45 percent.

But because of high medical costs and the risk of being
deported if they are discovered to have HIV infections, Central Asian women
migrants are often not tested until they become pregnant. The three groups are
very different in this regard, however. Kyrgyz and Uzbek women are
approximately three times as likely as Tajik women (21 percent) to be tested.

According
to the scholars, the Tajik pattern reflects the fact that Uzbek and Kyrgyz
women have on average more sexual partners than Tajik women do and that Uzbek
and Tajik women are more likely to have sex while drunk, something rarer among
Tajik women in part because rarer among Tajik men and in part because they are
more likely to insist on condom use.